Writings Fear in Four Dimensions A Review of Grand Theft Auto XXIIV ★ You cannot grow a pumpkin. 1099 contractors can earn ~7% more by reporting their expenses. USD by the numbers Plan Recurring Vacations With Friends Freezing Your Cake I built a crappy video podcast player waves & particles ★ Slap: Fun Cat Lang… with a Borrow Checker? Dear Aliens ★ How To Not Pay Your Taxes Mercury Personal Banking: First Impressions Explore Chaotic Autonomous Systems In...

Recently I was reviewing some shell script a colleague had written: if grep -e ' @[^@]\+@ ' " $DIR /install.sh " ; then I thought the \ before the + was a mistake, and also pointed out that if + was to be used we’d probably need to pass -E for extended regular expression (ERE) support. The colleague replied that \+ in a basic regular expression (BRE) was the same as + in ERE (one or more repetitions). This was news to me! I wanted to know more, so I turned to the FreeBSD ...

In 1947, Paul Erdős, the itinerant Hungarian mathematician, introduced what would become one of math’s most powerful tools. He wanted to prove that a certain kind of object existed — in this case, a network made of interconnected nodes. But strangely, his proof didn’t specify how to build it. Instead, he showed that if you consider all networks and select one at random, the chances that you’ll… Source In 1947, Paul Erdős, the itinerant Hungarian mathematician, introduced what woul...

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This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anne Lee Steele, whose blog can be found at aleesteele.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I’m Anne. I’ve spent almost a decade in...

Shall I end this life a pauper? If AI can do all work at human level or better, what stops corporations replacing us all with AI? This is the permanent underclass meme. The idea is: within a few years, all white collar work will be automated by AI, at which point there is no social mobility. The main way people cope is, they tell themselves: if I work hard, accumulate capital, maybe join one of the big AI labs, I might secure my place in the future. I want to argue this is a fantastically sho...

While I decide what to do with PEP 832 after polling folks on their opinion , I thought I would write out why I'm even bothering with any of this. I'm going to talk from the perspective of VS Code and its Python extensions , but you could just as easily substitute "VS Code" for your editor of choice or even "AI agent" and it wouldn't change the problem: it isn't necessarily easy for tools like VS Code to know what workflow (tool) you're using and thus where you're putting your (virtual) env...

In this post we’re going to see how share.acquire.mode=record_limit combined with: fewer consumers than partitions and various cases of “partition skew” …can result in subpar performance with share groups.  I stumbled on these issues when running large sets of dimensional tests with Dimster’s explore-limits mode, which finds the highest sustainable throughput while staying within a target end-to-end latency target. There was a specific subset of the tests that explore-limits mode wo...

Last Thursday I talked about retiring my RTX 3070 for a new AMD RX 9060 XT . This garnered a few questions from you fine people, which I’ve aggregated here. Why not the 9070 XT? Price, availability, and requirements. The AMD 9070 XT is the best graphics card for the money you can get today, and the 9070 gets close to it while offering efficiency gains I thought the industry had long abandoned. If I didn’t have other life priorities for that money, I’d have bought a 9070. I got t...

Say you put a cache in front of Postgres to speed up reads. A hot key expires: the next request misses the cache, so it queries Postgres to refill the key the key is popular, so while that first query runs, a hundred more pile in for it they all miss too, and each fires its own query Postgres ends up running a hundred identical queries at once, all for the same value sequenceDiagram participant U1 as User 1 participant UN as User N participant App as Application ...

A University of Exeter study found that adding plants to a workspace can raise productivity by up to 15%. NASA’s Clean Air Study showed certain indoor plants pull benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene out of enclosed rooms. For anyone working from home, one or two pots near the desk improves air quality without adding another chore. The ten plants below handle low light, irregular watering, and tight desk space. Why the Best Plants for Home Office Need to Survive Neglect? ...

Hello, we hope your week has been pleasant. 2.1 Experimental This week we released the 2.1 experimental. You can read the full changelog on our Forum . Funnily enough, the changelog was too long to post on Reddit, as the limit is 40,000 characters... oops :). Click to view full resolution You can opt in to experimental now, and there are some things to bear in mind: You get all the 2.1 changes today. 2.0 save games will load, but ...

I’ve been unemployed for eight months now, and haven’t written as much as I thought I would. Middle-aged angst is one reason, but another is the realization that most of the projects I was thinking of doing are solving yesterday’s problems. I have a long history of doing this: The JavaScript and Python versions of Software Design by Example are the books I needed in the 2000s when I was teaching undergraduate courses at the University of Toronto. I’m proud...

Content warning: This poem is about the ongoing heat in Europe. I strike an optimistic tone toward the end, but if you would prefer not to read about the heat, I offer you one of the Scottish poems I have written in stead . Nature’s weary tears fill the air; invisible, warming. Relentlessly, days proceed. Hours pass; Celsius rises. Midnights: warm like day. We stay inside. Blinds closed, water glasses full, cookers off. Flowers bloom early. Eyelids weigh; we yearn for rest that does not come....

I have to publish this now, we’re already halfway through W26. Current situation: JUST KIDDING I am actually inside staring at a computer instead of lying on my back in a meadow staring up at the sky. But I did see these nice clouds earlier today.  Monday 08 June: The U of Ark college visit. Zeke really likes it and they have a great engineering program. It poured down rain all morning. I bought umbrellas in the gift shop. I am bad at selfies.  ...

Exploring how compilers lower ordinary loops into explicit data-parallel kernels. Exploring how compilers lower ordinary loops into explicit data-parallel kernels.

“Landing of Spanish Colonists in the Port of Algiers” by Pierre Emile Gigoux de Grandpre, via Invaluable . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at Trump refusing to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slow trucking, why we stopped making new land, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing The ROAD ...

Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful . Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s possible for a piece of writing to remind you of what you already know. It’s common to know you don’t like something without being quite sure why, and reading an obvious statement (such as “accuracy matters , even when you agree with the broad strokes”) can help clarify why you find certain things distasteful. Sometimes you can see some obvious truth that no...

This is a quick post, mostly for my own reference. I've avoided LUTs and 'Log' video footage for years 1 , mostly because of the extra tiny bit of workflow involved. Like RAW photos, 'Log' footage retains the video sensor's full dynamic range, so you can pull more color and luminance information out of the footage later. But unlike photography, where RAW has been a thing for decades, and many workflows 'just work' without me having to 'grade' every individual photo, in video precious few con...

When most people think of the Coast Guard, they probably imagine daring rescues like you see in the movies—hopefully helicopters flying through hurricanes, like in  The Perfect Storm , though for many people, it’s probably just the five seconds we appear in  Top Gun . While it may be the “forgotten service” from time to time, the Coast Guard punches far above its weight class. Beyond search and rescue missions, there is another side of the Coast Guard focused on facilitating globa...

I recently got a Pebble Time 2 as it seemed like a fun smartwatch away from Google/Apple/Samsung with a good 4 weeks of battery life. One thing I wanted to do is to create a custom watchface for my specific problems. It took more effort to design the watch than I had anticipated and there’s a deceptively large amount of thought that has gone into some of the features here, so I thought it’d be interesting to write a little about it. I don’t get 30 days of battery life with the wa...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-8461 for the project FFmpeg , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix an out-of-bounds write in the MagicYUV decoder (libavcodec/magicyuv.c) caused by improper bounds checking, resulting in heap corruption, denial of service, and potential remote code execution when processing a specially crafted video file. This is due to the affected components being ...

When you start thinking deeply about a mathematics problem you may enter the "zone", a period of intense focus where you think solely about the problem and potential solutions, and more importantly block out all other thoughts and even lose track of time. Mathematicians don't own the zone, actors, musicians, athletes and many others have their own version of the zone. But for math, when working on an open problem, you have no idea how difficult a solution may be, or if a solution exists at all. ...